The Hunt Is This Season's Blair Witch

So, revenge fantasy The Hunt apparently got pulled by its studio Universal, with people clucking their tongues as to why (somehow, Donald Trump subtweeted something or other), possibly due to recent gun violence in the news. But given the paltry $15M budget and the overall contraction of first-release movies to streaming services, what seems more likely is that audiences are being played, and Universal never intended to do a theatrical release at all. This was always going straight to streaming; as with The Blair Witch Project, where the marketing was the smartest thing about the movie, this bears the field marks of a clever promotion, a "banned" movie that will resurface one day on Netflix.

Update: I guess I should say NBCUniversal's not-quite-ready-for-prime-time streaming service, whatever it ends up being called.

Molly Ratty Finally Writes A Post On Drug Patents, And It's Fantastic

Molly Ratty (@molratty on Twitter) has an excellent, excellent post on the Popehat blog about patent reform as applied to pharmaceuticals. Excerpt:

Since Hatch-Waxman passed, we’ve experienced an explosion in the number and size of generic drug companies and the availability of generic drugs. But there’s a problem if generic drugs cannot get to market because of patents, particularly in the case of patents that were never worthy of being granted in the first place. That’s what we have now. We have a patent system skewed toward granting and upholding patents that never should have issued. What’s worse, branded companies erect thickets of multiple patents on a single product that have the effect of extended the patent life cycle of the product. (Any readers in the tech industry should be familiar with the problem of “patent trolls”.)

The New York Times ran a dreadful op-ed full of horrible ideas, including patent seizure (why not just limit patent eligibility, and rescind patents no longer adhering to the new standard?), price fixing, and incredibly, using the FTC to undo what the USPTO has done. The whole thing is a stew of basic failures to understand how significant parts of the government actually work.

Update 2021-05-15: Some months ago, Molly took down her Twitter account, and apparently also the post at Popehat as the result of a threatened doxing. The Internet Archive of her piece can be found here.

Australian Cricket Accepts Transwomen In The Women's Game, Gets An Earful

The usual inanity about "inclusion":

Today we take a major step to ensure inclusiveness is at the heart of Australian Cricket.

Learn more about the inclusion of transgender and gender diverse people in the game: https://t.co/XbewXwazH4#ASportForAll pic.twitter.com/cRlM2TKx21

— Cricket Australia (@CricketAus) August 7, 2019

Luckily, @FondOfBeetles is on it:

Kevin Roberts, CEO of Cricket Australia said:
‘It doesn’t make any sense that today, people are discriminated against, harassed or excluded, because of who they are.’

Of course we exclude people in sports. 1/

— Dr FondOfBeetles (@FondOfBeetles) August 8, 2019

Full thread at threadreaderapp.